Archive | December 5th, 2010

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington. Now joining us again to discuss the WikiLeaks leak is Gareth Porter. He’s an investigative journalist and often-contributor to The Real News Network. Thanks for joining us again. So one of the cables that jumped out at you was about Lebanon. Tell us what you found.

GARETH PORTER, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST AND HISTORIAN: Well, this was one of the meetings, a high-level–or mid-level, I guess, is more accurate–meeting between US officials from the State Department and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and Ministry of Defense as well, and also Mossad. These are the various agencies that were involved on the Israeli side. And what happened in this is that the Ministry of Defense director of political military affairs, a man named Amos Gilad, brought up an issue with the Americans that shows just how seriously the situation in Lebanon and in the entire Middle East, in terms of the balance of power between Israel and its adversaries–Iran, the Hezbollah, and Syria–has changed in the last two or three years. And what he said–and I’ll read from the cable what he said–he said: “Gilad addressed threats posed by” what he called “‘Hizballahstan’ and ‘Hamastan’. . . . He noted that rockets from Lebanon can now cover the entire territory of Israel”. And this is something that’s very new. This was never the case in the past, of course, that Hezbollah rockets could actually cover the entire territory of Israel. They were really shorter-range rockets that could only reach a very small portion of the populated area of Israel.

JAY: Yeah, [Hassan] Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, said last spring publicly on Lebanese television that we now have the capability that if you target a building in Beirut, we can now target a building in Tel Aviv. If you take out one of our bridges, we can take out one of your bridges.

PORTER: And he was not exaggerating at all. And the Israelis are very concerned about this; they’re very upset about this. And I think what this reflects is a totally new balance of power, really, militarily, in the Middle East which had not existed prior to this buildup of rockets within Lebanon, held by the Hezbollah. And I think that one can say with a fair degree of confidence that this actually stabilizes the situation, relatively speaking, compared with what existed before. The Israelis are no longer able to contemplate another war in Lebanon without considering very seriously the consequences of that, which could be, you know, another war involving Iran as well, because of the tit-for-tat retaliation.

JAY: And people have flipped it the other way, that if there actually is an attack on Iran, which a lot of the WikiLeaks has been about, the Israel pushing United States to attack Iran, that there can’t be that attack on Iran without some kind of attack on Hezbollah, because people think Hezbollah will fire back in defense of Iran. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know.

PORTER: Well, that is certainly a serious possibility, that the two issues will, obviously, merge, that the two conflicts will merge, and that Hezbollah-Israel war would then be a result.

JAY: I mean, one of the questions, I guess, is: is the real issue a nuclear bomb in Iran, when US intelligence agencies seem to keep saying to Israel–although so far that’s not part of the WikiLeaks material that I’ve seen–but they keep saying that any real bomb threat is three years off, five years off, if there even is a weapons program, which is still–there seems no, you know, definitive evidence that such a thing even exists? Is the real issue Hezbollah and Hamas?

PORTER: I think it’s absolutely primarily Hezbollah and Hamas and the broader balance of power that exists between Israel and all of these adversaries. And what the Israelis cannot abide is precisely the loss of their clear-cut military supremacy, which is now what has been lost with this new balance of power, conventional balance of power, involving the rockets in Lebanon versus the Israeli military, obviously, ability to retaliate or to take the offensive. And this is in fact what it amounts to is a loss of the ability of the Israelis to easily contemplate an aggressive attack on any other neighbor in the region, and this is what the Israelis really are concerned about and what I think, you know, deserves to be much more widely known and understood at this point.

JAY: Well, that seems to go to the core of the whole question of why is everyone so worried about a nuclear bomb in Iran in the first place, in the sense that even if they had a few bombs, that doesn’t give any offensive capacity. It only gives–frankly, even as a defensive capacity, it’s hard to understand what it does other than make you a target. But perhaps–.

PORTER: Well, I mean, nuclear weapons are a matter of perception, I guess, is the bottom line, and perceptions are obviously highly subject to subjectivity, and that’s really the problem.

JAY: Thanks for joining us. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Posted in USAComments Off on HEZBOLLA ROCKETS COVER ALL OF THE ZIO=NAZI STATE

n

Israeli press reported today that the wildfire, which has been raging in northern Israel since Thursday, continued to spread on Saturday morning, burning houses in the pastoral artists’ village Ein Hod.

Ein Hod which lies on the road to Haifa is an Israeli artists’ colony. It is located at the foot of Mount Carmel, overlooking the Mediterranean coast. In the fifties, a group of Jewish artists decided to make Ein Hod into their home. They built studios and workshops. Ein Hod is the only artists’ village in Israel, one of the few in the world. Israel and Israelis are very proud of their artists’ colony. Israelis are totally devastated by the impact of the fire on their beloved artist village.

Yet, there is something Israelis may prefer to hide. Ein Hod’s new artistic habitants are far from being innocent. Ein Hod is in fact Ayn Aawd, a 1948 ethnically cleansed Palestinian village. Unlike very many other Palestinian villages Ayn Awad was not destroyed. Though its habitants were brutally expelled, most of the houses remained intact. The Israeli Artists, are basically a bunch of plunderers. They also turned the village mosque into a restaurant/bar, the “Bonanza”. It is obviously clear that the Israeli artist community participated actively in the Zionist crime.

Those few uprooted Palestinian villagers who survived the 1948 invasion built a new village near by, also called Ayn Hawd. Far from being surprising, the new village is not legally recognized by the Israeli government. It is denied all municipal services (including water, electricity, and roads). In the 1970s the Israeli government erected a fence around this new village in order to prevent it from expanding. As it happens, Israeli artists dwell in Palestinian homes while the dispossessed indigenous owners are living in poverty around the corner with no running water or electricity.

In the last six decades the JNF planted millions of pine trees around Israeli villages and towns. These newly planted forests were there to hide traces of Palestinian civilization and the 1948 Nakba. Ein Hod also surrounded itself with pine trees. It helped the Artists to concentrate on creative matters and to evade the misery in Ayn Hawd. It allows the artists to engage with ‘beauty’ and avoid the sin they are entangled with. Seemingly, the forest between Ein Hod and Ayn Hawd is now burned. Nature found its way to confront the Israelis with his and her past and present. Yet, I am far from being convinced whether the Israelis can be morally awaken to the disastrous reality they are complicit in.

Ein Hod is just a symbol of Israeli morbidity. It is a symbol of ethical blindness. But it is also a symptom of Israeli hopelessness.

In spite of its military might, its ‘technological superiority’, its air force, its nuclear capacity and AIPAC, Israel doesn’t know how to deal with fire. It fails to deal with the most banal domestic issues. Israel has been caught begging the world to come to its rescue. Zionism that was there to bring to life an authentic, self-sufficient, civilized and ethical Jew has failed all the way through

NOVANEWS

Zio=Nazi Yair Naveh

The great wonderment with which the appointment of Yair Naveh has been greeted is itself to be wondered at. After all, who else could be appointed as the Deputy Chief of Staff if not Yair Naveh? Who else loves to immediately assassinate everyone who looks suspicious to him, to immediately kill whoever moves, to destroy, to devastate, to conquer, to crush? Yair Naveh is one of the best sons of the army, he learned everything he had to learn and proved himself in the field.

The High Court of Justice does not interest him in the least (Uri Blau, thanks to information provided by ex-soldier Anat Kamm, Haaretz, 28 November 2008), he does not recognize human rights, he hates Arabs – or maybe they just get in his way at work. But to kill, he loves. What else is needed in a Deputy Chief of Staff of the Occupation army the function of the soldiers and officers of which has been well defined over the course of forty years: killing, liquidation, destruction, devastation and abusing a civilian population of millions of people?

But those who wonder at his appointment and want to thwart it are still infused with a kind of groundless romanticism about the Israeli Occupation Army. A romanticism that claims that people like Yair Naveh are the exceptions and we must not leave the army in their hands. Nor in the hands of the settlers, nor of the mercenaries or the rabbis who preach the murder of non- Jewish children, nor of the pilots who feel a bump on the wing when they release a bomb over an inhabited house [1] nor in the hands of girl-soldiers like Eden Aberjil or in the hands of commanders like Col. Bentzi Gruber who is absolutely certain that the slaughter in Gaza was an expression of the justice of the path and that God is therefore on our side, that the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza was done according to the ethical code of the IDF that set moral boundaries for us and therefore “it is not possible that we harmed innocents,” and who does not understand why he is getting unpleasant letters that scare his wife in her beautiful reinforced house in a settlement (Yediot Aharonot, Friday 26/11.2010). In whose hands, then, should we leave the army?

Maybe in the hands of those who participated as observers and helpers at the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla (see Oscar Nominated Walse with Bashir) and whose souls have been troubled since then to this very day, or in the hands of those who Break the Silence because they cannot bear the burden of their crimes and are haunted day and night by the horrified look in the eyes of a small girl in Gaza/Jenin/Nablus/Beit Umar/Bil’in/Ni’lin/Sheikh Jarrah/Beit Hanun/Jabaliya/Qalqiliya or Hebron, or in the hands of the female soldiers who, unlike Eden Aberjil, have difficulty remembering if they had smiled when they were photographed beside the corpse of a child in Hebron, for the fun of it, for the guys, for the gigs, and whose lives have been constantly troubled ever since they were released from service in the army of killing and realized what they had done?[3]

Yair Naveh, his pupils and his teachers, prevent us from fantasizing and believing despite all the evidence that forty years of abuse, killing and destruction are exceptions to the ethical code of the most immoral army in the world. The appointment of Yair Naveh prevents us from continuing to tell our pure, young, enthusiastic children who want to contribute and act and build and educate, who flow into the pre-army programmes with a wonderful fervour of self-realization, sure that they can bring about change ‘from within,’ that everything will be all right if only they enlist in the right units – the “combat” units – that is, the units of murder and killing and liquidation, or at least in the “combat support” units – those that provide training in killing and murder and that strengthen our forces; the appointment of Yair Naveh prevents us from continuing to tell our children that in reply to the rabbis’ pamphlets that call for killing and slaughter, they can distribute their own – and our – doctrine of peace and brotherhood among the IDF troops.

The appointment of Yair Naveh is a fitting one. None is more suitable than he to stand nearly at the head of the most immoral army in the world, the cruellest army in the world that considers itself enlightened. An army with unlimited supplies of money and power and periodically mercenaries (have they judaized all of them yet?), a mob immersed in impulses and interests not one of which is moral. That is the meaning of an army. For that reason it is not Yair Naveh but us – who have to resign from the role of creating soldiers, providing soldiers, giving birth to soldiers and educating future soldiers. We must gather up our courage and teach our children to refuse. Refuse to take part in an organization that is led by war criminals, murderers of children.

An organization like that cannot be anything but a crime organization. Avoid it like you would avoid live fire, we should tell them, and think of other ways to contribute to the society in which you live. Maybe you can go to live in Yeruham for three years, help Ethiopian children who are treated with blatant racism in their promised land, or go live in Bil’in or Ni’lin or in any other Palestinian village that the army has set its eye to destroying? Maybe you can organize more and more rescue boats to Gaza? Maybe you can block the path with your bodies when police and soldiers come to throw children out onto the street in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan?

Maybe you can help refugees who come to our shores fleeing from holocaust or genocide because they heard that there was democracy here, and help them to hide, to cope, to escape from the cruel racist government of the democracy of the Jews? Maybe you can save the Dead Sea? There are so many possibilities, children, to contribute to society, to the state if you will, to the place where you live. And those possibilities do not include the uniform of the IDF, nor its guns, nor its bombs or its commanders the model and paragon of whom is Yair Naveh, one of many whose orders you should never obey.

So it is to our advantage that one should see such a man standing at the head of the army – or nearly so. The appointment of Yair Naveh will permit us to point to a specific object and say to our children: do you see? That is the bad man. Do not go near. And when they ask in fear: what does he do to children? – We will tell them: he kills them, just like that, without the High Court of Justice and without Btselem. [2]

Translated from Hebrew by George Malent

\Translator’s notes\

1. In August 2002, shortly after the Israeli Air Force dropped a one-ton bomb on a house in Gaza, killing Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh along with 14 innocent civilians, most of whom were children, the commander of the Air Force, Dan Halutz, was asked how he felt as a pilot when he dropped a bomb. He replied: “I feel a light bump on the plane as a result of the release of the bomb. A second later, it’s over. And that’s all. That’s what I feel.” Halutz was later appointed Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces. (Vered Levi-Barzilai, “Yefei nefesh, nim’astem”, Haaretz, 23 Aug. 2002. In Hebrew. http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=543557 )

2. Btselem: an Israeli human rights organization that monitors abuses by the Israeli army and police in the West Bank. Website: http://www.btselem.org/English/index.asp . Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said he wished he could deal with “Palestinian terrorists” “Without the high court and without Betselem”

3. Reference to the documentary “to see if I’m smiling”. By Tamat Yarom, 2007.
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtPE.jhtml?itemNo=921422&contrassID=2&subContrassID=13&sbSubContras

NOVANEWS

Rep. Ron Paul defends WikiLeaks

12/04/2010

While some of his colleagues are calling for Julian Assange to be prosecuted as a terrorist or assassinated, in an interview on Fox News’ Freedom Watch on Thursday, Republican Rep. Ron Paul said that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks should get the same kind of protections as the mainstream media when it comes to releasing information.

“In a free society we’re supposed to know the truth,” Paul said, quoted by Politico. “In a society where truth becomes treason, then we’re in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.”

“This whole notion that Assange, who’s an Australian, that we want to prosecute him for treason. I mean, aren’t they jumping to a wild conclusion?” he added. “This is media, isn’t it? I mean, why don’t we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this?”

“What we need is more WikiLeaks about the Federal Reserve,” he added. “Can you imagine what it’d be like if we had every conversation in the last 10 years with our Federal Reserve people, the Federal Reserve chairman, with all the central bankers of the world and every agreement or quid-pro-quo they have? It would be massive. People would be so outraged.”

In a Twitter post on Friday, Ron Paul wrote: “Re: WikiLeaks — In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.”

NOVANEWS

By: Daphne Eviatar

Earlier this week we learned from Wikileaks that the Bush Administration tried to stop Germany from investigating the CIA’s alleged torture of a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who’d been mistaken for an al Qaeda terrorist and imprisoned in Afghanistan. I observed that the Obama Administration would have been hard-pressed to take a different position, given that it’s refused to investigate (or allow others to sue over) those claims itself.

Now, David Corn in Mother Jones has documented that the Obama administration has, in fact, done just what I thought it would: it’s continued the Bush policy of interfering in other countries’ attempts to apply the rule of law.

As the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on Tuesday, a series of cables reveal that U.S. officials pressured Spain’s chief prosecutor to get the courts to drop the potential criminal investigations of senior U.S. officials for their roles in the torture of detainees in U.S. custody. U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, former vice presidential chief of staff David Addington, former Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Baybee, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and former DOD General Counsel William Haynes were all named as potential targets.

the Embassy of the United States in Madrid wielded powerful resources in an extraordinary effort to impede or terminate pending criminal investigations in Spain which involved American political and military figures assumed to have been involved in incidents of torture in Guantánamo, violations of the laws of war in Iraq or kidnappings in connection with the CIA’s extraordinary renditions program.

But those “powerful resources” did not end with the Bush administration. As Corn points out: “A ‘confidential’ April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department–one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks–details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.”

The US Embassy started tracking the case as soon a Spanish human rights group requested the investigation in March 2009. But after Republican Senators Judd Gregg and Mel Martinez got involved, the Obama administration’s chargé d’affaires at the US embassy in Spain became more active as well.

According to the cable, the Americans “underscored that the prosecutions would not be understood or accepted in the US and would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship” between Spain and the United States. As Corn recounts: “Here was a former head of the GOP and a representative of a new Democratic administration (headed by a president who had decried the Bush-Cheney administration’s use of torture) jointly applying pressure on Spain to kill the investigation of the former Bush officials.”

As I noted in my earlier post on the El-Masri case, it’s not all that surprising that the U.S. government wouldn’t want its own senior officials prosecuted in another country. But for the Obama administration to play such an active role in thwarting the ordinary course of an ally’s judicial system which was investigating crimes that President Obama had himself decried is pretty disturbing.

Horton put it this way yesterday: “These cables show that the U.S. embassy in Madrid had far exceeded [its] mandate . . . and was actually successfully steering the course of criminal investigations, the selection of judges, and the conduct of prosecutors.” In Spain, the “disclosure has created deep concern about the independence of judges in Spain and the manipulation of the entire criminal justice system by a foreign power.”

The way the Obama administration is wielding its power to thwart the rule of law abroad ought to create deep concern in the United States as well.

Posted in USAComments Off on WIKILEAKS: OBAMA TRIED TO THWART TORTURE PROSECUTION

LONDON — The law is closing in on Julian Assange. Swedish authorities won a court ruling Thursday in their bid to arrest the WikiLeaks founder for questioning in a rape case, British intelligence is said to know where in England he’s hiding, and U.S. pundits and politicians are demanding he be hunted down or worse.

The former computer hacker who has embarrassed the U.S. government and foreign leaders with his online release of a huge trove of secret American diplomatic cables suffered a legal setback when Sweden’s Supreme Court upheld an order to detain him – a move that could lead to his extradition.

Assange is accused in Sweden of rape, sexual molestation and coercion in a case from August, and Swedish officials have alerted Interpol and issued a European arrest warrant to bring him in for questioning.

The 39-year-old Australian denies the charges, which his lawyer, Mark Stephens, said apparently stemmed from a “dispute over consensual but unprotected sex.” Stephens said the case is turning into an exercise in persecution.

While Assange has not made a public appearance for nearly a month, his lawyer insisted authorities know where to find him.

“Both the British and the Swedish authorities know how to contact him, and the security services know exactly where he is,” Stephens told The Associated Press.

It was unclear if or when police would act on Sweden’s demands. Police there acknowledged Thursday they would have to refile their European arrest warrant after British authorities asked for more details on the maximum penalties for the three crimes.

Scotland Yard declined comment, as did the Serious and Organized Crime Agency, responsible for processing European arrest warrants for suspects in England – where The Guardian claims Assange is hiding out.

Story continues below

Advertisement

In a statement, Assange’s lawyer in Sweden, Bjorn Hurtig, suggested that Assange is being retaliated against for the leaks.

“I do find it somewhat strange and to say the least `coincidental’ that Interpol has made the arrest warrant public simultaneous to Wikileaks releasing its latest revelations,” Hurtig said. “My mind remains open as to whether the prosecutor has been influenced by any third-party considerations.”

Stephens – who also represents the AP on media-related matters – said that if Assange is ever served with a warrant, he will fight it in British court. “The process in this case has been so utterly irregular that the chances of a valid arrest warrant being submitted to me are very small,” he said.

The Swedish case has been subject to a great deal of back and forth, with Swedish prosecutors repeatedly overruling each other and disagreeing over whether to classify the most serious accusation as rape.

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said late Wednesday that the organization is trying to keep Assange’s location a secret for security reasons. He noted that commentators in the United States and Canada have called for Assange to be hunted down or killed.

Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, likened Assange to an al-Qaida propagandist and accused him, without offering any proof, of having “blood on his hands.”

“Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders?” she asked in a message posted on her Facebook page.

“I think Assange should be assassinated, actually,” Tom Flanagan, a former adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, told the CBC. “I think Obama should put out a contract or maybe use a drone or something.” Flanagan, a U.S.-born professor of political science at the University of Calgary, later apologized.

In Washington, the top Democrat and Republican at the Senate Intelligence Committee called on Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Assange for espionage. Committee chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and vice chairman Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said in a letter Thursday that they believe Assange’s behavior falls under the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to willfully pass on defense information that could hurt the U.S.

U.S. government lawyers are investigating whether Assange can be prosecuted for spying, a senior American defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said earlier this week. WikiLeaks has not said how it obtained the documents, but the government’s prime suspect is an Army private, Bradley Manning, who is in the brig on charges of leaking other classified documents to WikiLeaks.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said WikiLeaks is not a news organization and Assange is neither a journalist nor a whistle-blower, but someone with a political agenda.

“I think he’s an anarchist,” Crowley said. He said Assange is “trying to undermine the international system that enables us to cooperate and collaborate with other governments.”

“What he’s doing is damaging to our efforts and the efforts of other governments,” the spokesman said.

One batch of the latest leaked dispatches – these from the U.S. Embassy staff in Turkmenistan – portrays the president of the former Soviet state in Central Asia, Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov, as “vain, suspicious, guarded, strict, very conservative, a practiced liar,” and “not a very bright guy.”

According to another one of the cables, Georgia’s ambassador in Rome claimed that Berlusconi was promised a cut of the profits in energy deals with Russia. Berlusconi denied the allegation.

The documents also included a frank assessment from the American envoy to Stockholm about Sweden’s historic policy of nonalignment – a policy that the U.S. ambassador, Michael Woods, seemed to suggest was for public consumption only.

Sweden’s military and intelligence cooperation with the U.S. “give the lie to the official policy” of non-participation in military alliances, Woods said. He added in a separate cable that Sweden’s defense minister fondly remembers his time as a high school student in America and “loves the U.S.”

Woods cautioned American officials not to trumpet Sweden-U.S. cooperation in the fight against terrorism too openly, because that would open up the Swedish government to domestic criticism.

In England, meanwhile, a front-page story in The Guardian alleged that one of the leaked cables showed British politicians trying to keep Parliament in the dark over the storage of American cluster bombs on British territory – despite an international ban on the weapons. Britain’s Foreign Office denied the charge.

Posted in USAComments Off on JULIAN ASSANGE FEELS NOOSE TIGHTENING AS LAW ENFORCEMENT CLOSES IN

NOVANEWS

Talking about WikiLeaks on Facebook or Twitter could endanger your job prospects, a State Department official warned students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs this week.

An email from SIPA’s Office of Career Services went out Tuesday afternoon with a caution from the official, an alumnus of the school. Students who will be applying for jobs in the federal government could jeopardize their prospects by posting links to WikiLeaks online, or even by discussing the leaked documents on social networking sites, the official was quoted as saying.

“[The alumnus] recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter,” the Office of Career Services advised students. “Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.”

While the massive disclosure of once-classified documents detailing some of the nation’s most tightly-guarded secrets has inflamed allies and enemies alike, the move by the State Department represents a new front in the administration’s campaign against unauthorized leaks.

Philip J. Crowley, spokesman for the State Department, denied in an email message any federal involvement:

This is not true. We have instructed State Department employees not to access the WikiLeaks site and download posted documents using an unclassified network since these documents are still classified. We condemn what Mr. Assange is doing, but have given no advice to anyone beyond the State Department to my knowledge.

When asked why Columbia — which confirmed to the New York Times earlier today that an email had been sent from its offices — would have sent the message, Crowley said, “If an employee of the State Department sent such an email, it does not represent a formal policy position.”

Earlier this week, companies like Amazon and PayPal shut off the services they provided to WikiLeaks, threatening the site’s survival and impeding further dissemination of its treasure trove of classified documents.

Story continues below

Now, however, it appears the federal government has moved beyond staunching the flow of leaked information, to suppressing even the very mention of WikiLeaks online by prospective employees.

While republishing the leaked documents could indeed raise legal issues for students, it was the admonition against social media chatter that riled some at Columbia.

“They seem to be unable to make the distinction between having an opinion and having a contractual obligation to keep a secret,” said Hugh Sansom, a masters student from New York.

Students were taken aback by the email, said Sansom, who described his non-American classmates — nearly half of this year’s incoming class at Columbia speaks a native language other than English — as “amused and surprised.”

By late in the week, word of the email had reached the blogosphere.

“Seems the ambitious young things studying IR and considering a foreign service careers are being warned not to touch Cablegate,” wrote Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist. A comment posted to that story said that Georgetown University had been similarly put on notice.

Stephen D. Biddle, a professor at the school, said that the email amounted to counseling on the university’s part.

“It strikes me as entirely plausible that some government officials would take a dim view of people appearing to use WikiLeaks material for professional gain,” Biddle said.

But as for commenting on the leaked information on Facebook or Twitter, Biddle acknowledged, “once it’s out, it’s out.”

We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

Regards,
Office of Career Services

Posted in USAComments Off on STATE DEPARTMENT: DO NOT DISCUSS WIKILEAKS

NOVANEWSW

By CHAS FREEMAN

Published: December 4, 2010

THE editor of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has much in common with the anarchists of the early 20th century: he aims to disrupt the established order by impairing its alliances and violating its proprieties. With the release of a quarter-million documents written by American diplomats at home and abroad, many of them shockingly candid, he has gone some distance toward accomplishing this. Take the Middle East, for example.

Most striking were the leaks regarding Arab concerns about Iran’s aspirations for regional hegemony and its nuclear programs. According to the documents, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia exhorted the United States to cripple Iran’s nuclear programs with air strikes, urging us to “cut off the head of the snake.“ While some hard-line analysts and pundits are relieved to find the Arabs “on our side” and feel that this disclosure will help us form a stronger alliance against Tehran, it’s more likely that the leaks will simply raise Iran’s prestige by adding to the persistent overestimation of its influence and abilities.

More troubling, the leaks will reduce the candor of American dialogue in the region and elsewhere. Arab leaders in particular will now think twice before either speaking honestly or telling American visitors or diplomats what Washington wants to hear.

In addition, Arab rulers, despite all the weapons their states have bought from America and elsewhere, again find themselves exposed to their own people as impotent to handle a serious regional problem. They appear totally dependent on the United States, a country that is deeply unpopular among Arabs for its policies in the region, to take care of it for them.

What comes through loud and clear in these cables is a familiar Gulf Arab refrain: “We have a problem we don’t know how to deal with. You Americans must solve it for us. Do what you think best. We’ll look the other way if necessary.”

Israel, for its part, has been quick to assert that the leaks show that it and the Gulf Arab states have a common outlook regarding Iran. “More and more states, governments and leaders in the Middle East and the wider region and the world believe this is the fundamental threat,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said when asked about the cables.

“No one will now be able to allege that Israel is acting irresponsibly,” wrote Aluf Benn, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz. “When the King of Saudi Arabia and the King of Jordan call for lopping off the head of the Iranian snake, no one will believe them when they denounce an Israeli operation.” But there is little to back up such claims. Israel has long wanted the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. It has also strongly implied that if Washington refuses to do so, it will go ahead on its own — in a manner calculated to leave the United States no choice but to join it in war with Iran.

The Gulf Arabs want to forestall Iranian nuclear ambitions, but they are willing to defer to American judgment about how best to achieve that, and they certainly don’t want it to result in a war in their own neighborhood. Clearly, this is a very different position from the one held by Mr. Netanyahu.

There are other ways in which the Arabs and Israelis are at odds on Iran policy. The leaks show that Gulf Arab rulers are concerned above all that a nuclear-armed Iran would have greater prestige in the region and ever-greater influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. The nuclear weapons themselves, they feel, are primarily a threat to Israel and American forces in the region.

Yes, Israelis fear that Iran might gratuitously attempt another Holocaust by attacking them. But the leaked documents also show that one of the main worries Israel has about Iran’s nuclear ambitions is that it could lose its regional monopoly on nuclear weapons, limiting their leverage on a whole range of issues. One doubts the Gulf Arabs share that concern.

In the end, contrary to the hopes and fears of some, the leaks do not make war with Iran more likely or demonstrate a basis for Arab-Israeli solidarity against Tehran. Mr. Assange’s grand accomplishment will be nothing more than to make it far harder for American diplomats to get candid answers from their Gulf Arab and Israeli counterparts.

The Middle East is a place where yes means maybe, maybe means no, no is never heard (except in Israel), and a plea for a foreign solution to regional problems is a cop-out, not a serious request for action. It is where hypocrisy first gained a bad name. WikiLeaks has hurt America without changing that.

Chas Freeman was an assistant secretary of defense from 1993 to 1994 and the United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf war.

NOVANEWS

12/5/2010

TSA Tyrants Pushing the Public too Far

by Jeff Davis

America’s airports have now become a kind of one-stop shop for perverts, so long as the perv is wearing a federal badge. All races, all genders and every age group including children are targets for grabby federal agents.

ABC News reports: “The beleaguered head of the Transportation Security Administration said today that at least one airport passenger screening went too far when an officer reached inside a traveler’s underwear, and the agency is open to rethinking its current protocols.”

No, it isn’t. If they were open to anything of the kind then Janet Napolitano would have resigned long since and they would never have instituted the groping in the first place.

ABC notes “An ABC News employee said she was subject to a demeaning search at Newark Liberty International Airport Sunday morning. The woman who checked me reached her hands inside my underwear and felt her way around,’ she said. ‘It was basically worse than going to the gynecologist. It was embarrassing. It was demeaning. It was inappropriate.’”

So we had to wait until an ABC News employee got molested! Her complaints actually got heard and reported on the news. Ordinary people meanwhile are simply ignored.)

ABC goes on: “In recent days, several passengers have come forward to tell shocking stories about their experiences with TSA officers. Thomas Sawyer, a bladder cancer survivor, said he was humiliated after a pat down broke his urostomy bag, leaving the 61-year-old covered in his own urine. Sawyer said he warned the TSA officials twice the pat down could break the seal. ‘I was so embarrassed and so petrified of going out into the airport and people would see me and quote unquote smell me,’ Sawyer said.

‘My underwear had dropped to the floor and I’m standing there in front of them with my underwear and had to ask to pull it up.’ Cathy Bossi, a long-time flight attendant and breast cancer survivor said the TSA made her take off her prosthetic breast. ‘She put her full hand on my breast and said What is this? I said ‘It’s a prosthesis because I’ve had a breast cancer,’ Bossi said. ‘And she said, ‘You’ll need to show me that.’ A video of a father taking his young son’s shirt off so he can be searched has gone viral online with nearly half a million views in just three days.”

Now, is the regime being tyrannical here? Or simply stupid?

If they’re just being stupid, then they’re falling back on naked body scanners because they’re out of ideas as to how to prevent terrorism. There is only one real way to anticipate such an attack, and that is to profile young Muslim men and to some degree young Muslim women, but of course the present regime won’t profile them because they put political correctness ahead of sanity.

If they’re being tyrannical then this whole thing is an experiment on the part of the government to see how far they can push people before some resistance arises.

Either way, we suggest you drive or take AmTrak in the future. But wait–now Janet Napolitano is threatening to install the nude scanners in train stations and bus depots.

One thing that tyrants always seem to forget is that it’s the “little things” that push people over the edge into a rebellion. 235 years ago it was a tax on tea. After that it was the French Queen saying “Let them eat cake.” And today, there is this federal obsession with seeing us naked and groping us. Let them keep pushing us and then see what happens.

NOVANEWS

12/4/2010

Helen Thomas Skewers Zionists Agains

By Rev. Ted Pike

Helen Thomas, veteran Washington journalist and political insider, has done it again—spoken the whole truth about Jewish supremacism’s control of America. In a speech to an Arab-American group in Detroit she said,

I can call a president of the United States anything in the book but I can’t touch Israel, which has Jewish-only roads in the West Bank. No American would tolerate that — white-only roads… We are owned by the propagandists against the Arabs. There’s no question about that. Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. No question in my opinion. They put their money where their mouth is…We’re being pushed into a wrong direction in every way.

Thomas defiantly stands by the statement that ended her journalistic career in May when she said the Israelis should “get the h— out of Palestine” and “go home” to “Poland, Germany, and America, and everywhere else.” Now she says, “I paid the price for that. But it was worth it, to speak the truth.”

Of Lebanese Arab (Semitic) descent, Thomas answered the accusation that she is anti-Semitic.

I’d say I’m a Semite. What are you talking about…We all know the Arabs are maligned. They are automatically terrorists. I was called the Hizballah at the White House, Hamas, and everything else. But I never bowed to those kinds of slurs because I know who I am. I am an American.

Denying that Arabs in general are terrorists, Thomas said it was former Israeli leader “Menachim Begin who created terrorism. They bragged in his first book, about creating the modus operandi for terrorists.”

She adds that Zionists have to understand Palestine belongs to Arabs, too. “Palestinians were there long before any European Zionists.”

Thomas commented on the folly of appointing a Zionist Jew in charge of Mideast affairs. “Obama, he puts in charge for the Arab world a Zionist like Dennis Ross. You don’t put a Zionist in charge of the Muslim world in the White House.”

She also commented on the folly of US involvement in Mideast wars (fought to make the Mideast safe for Israel). Thomas said the war in Iraq was “built on lies.”

Seven years of war now with Iraq. They did nothing to us. They are totally innocent, and they were just demonized. I’m not saying Saddam Hussein wasn’t a terrible man. But how many thousands of Iraqis did you kill, for what reason?…They’ve never explained the war. No weapons of mass destruction. No ties to Al-Qaeda. What is this? Why are we killing those people? And why are we there?

We teach our children to be good citizens, never kill, never lie, never do bad things, and yet in 3-4 weeks, we train them to go and kill people half way around the world, and still have yet to give them a good reason to kill and die.

ADL, World Net Daily Vilify Thomas

Predictably, the Anti-Defamation League issued an immediate protest, labeling Thomas anti-Semitic and calling for rescinding of all her many honors and awards from journalistic and educational institutions nationwide.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said:

Helen Thomas has clearly, unequivocally revealed herself as a vulgar anti-Semite. Her suggestion that Zionists control government, finance and Hollywood is nothing less than classic, garden-variety anti-Semitism. This is a sad final chapter to an otherwise illustrious career. Unlike her previous, spontaneous remarks into a camera, these words were carefully thought out and conscious. It shows a prejudice that is deep-seated and obsessive.

While we will never know what the hidden trigger was that led Thomas to reveal her prejudice, it is troubling that for more than 60 years she has made a pretense of impartiality as a journalist with a large megaphone. It makes it even that much more horrendous and horrific that she is now using that megaphone to release her prejudice in its crudest, most vulgar form. Through her words and deeds she has besmirched both herself and her profession.

It is time for those schools and professional organizations that have honored Thomas in one form or another over the years to consider rescinding those honors in light of her pervasively anti-Semitic rhetoric. Professional associations and academic institutions should not want to be associated with an anti-Semite.

Ironically, Thomas’ remarks follow closely on virulent attacks by the Jewish Southern Poverty Law Center on 18 Christian/conservative watchdog organizations in America. SPLC is accusing them of being “hate groups” which government, police and media should especially monitor. ADL, piously instructing Tea Partiers in “civility and restraint,” breathes not a word of criticism of SPLC’s vicious stereotyping of the “homophobic” right.

Responses from Christian conservative leaders to SPLC’s attack are predictably weak. No one dares mention that SPLC is 100 percent Jewish, although SPLC repeatedly attacks Christians for what they are. Tony Perkins, head of Family Research Council, was the boldest. He demanded an apology from SPLC. Joseph Farah blusters but also can’t bring himself to utter the forbidden J-word. In fact, WorldNetDaily, quoting Foxman, joins ADL in mocking and deriding Thomas as anti-Semitic.

That leaves crusty, 90-year-old Helen Thomas as the only truth-teller among those violently attacked by ADL/SPLC over the past week. Not valuing her lost legacy of honors and position as a columnist for Hearst, she boldly proves that speaking the whole truth means the most to her. Of much greater courage and integrity than “Christian” leaders in America today, she may well be the bravest woman in public life in our time.